Delayed Reaction
by AngelQueen
Summary: Her son is baptized in the tears of his family. Post-S3CS. Mary/Matthew.


_Delayed Reaction  
_By AngelQueen

**Disclaimer:** _Downton Abbey _is the property of Julian Fellowes. I make no claim on it and write this purely for entertainment purposes. No copyright infringement intended.

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Her son is baptized in the tears of his family. Even her grandmother is weeping quietly into her handkerchief, not even able to muster up a muttered excuse of a cold or some such.

Mary is the only one who is dry-eyed. She has yet to shed a single tear since she'd been told the news, the morning after Matthew had left. No one had wanted to wake her, to make her face this latest horror the world has dropped on her. It had fallen to her father to tell her when he appeared by her bed, his face positively grey from grief.

_"There… there was an accident, Mary. I'm so sorry, darling… Matthew… he's d-gone."_

Dead. Her father couldn't bring himself to say it.

Mary hadn't cried. Not then, and not now when her son is presented to the world as Matthew Robert Reginald Crawley, Master Crawley, heir apparent to the earldom of Grantham.

Now she stands in the nursery, standing over her son's cradle, watching him sleep. Her eyes sweep over him. His features are still indistinct, and she cannot say who he resembles just yet. Even his eyes are still the blue of a newborn, much as little Sybbie's had been, so Mary cannot say if they will be the blue like his father's, or dark like her own.

_Matthew Robert Reginald Crawley_, she thinks. _It's a good name, no matter who he turns out to look like._

"Mary?"

She looks up from her vigil to see her father standing in the doorway of the nursery. She does her best to muster a smile for him. "Yes, Papa?"

He moves toward her. "Are you all right?" he asks her softly, careful not to wake his slumbering grandson.

Mary glances back at the baby, and then at her father and she nods. "Quite well," she replies.

They stand in silence over the cradle, watching the baby sleep, the baby on whom all their hopes, dreams, and securities are now invested. Just as everything had been invested in Matthew, now it has fallen on Matthew's son. It's almost laughably absurd, Mary thinks, that everything should rely on a fatherless infant.

The laugh escapes her just as her father leads her out of the nursery. He looks at her, clearly startled, but Mary just keeps laughing for several moments. Surprise begins to turn to alarm, so she makes an effort to control herself.

"I'm all right, Papa," she assures him, trying to suppress her rather inappropriate giggles. "It's just… it just hit me…" She glances at the closed door of the nursery, and then continues, "I've named my son after two men he'll never know. You… you're the only one left alive, Papa." She suddenly feels the need to grasp his arm. "You must stay alive. Otherwise it will be positively _morbid_ that my poor darling is named for a pack of dead men." Her grip begins to tremble, and she shudders. "Dead…"

Her father gazes at her, his expression understandably distressed. "Oh, Mary…"

Just like that, the damn breaks, and Mary finds herself in her father's arms, sobbing against his shoulder. She cries, cries harder than she ever has before. She cries for her son, who has lost the father who loved him so much, for her father, who lost the closest thing he had to a son of his own, and for herself. She's lost Matthew so many times before - her own, foolish stupidity before the war, when Matthew became engaged to Lavinia, when she agreed to marry Richard, when Lavinia died - but at least then he was still alive, still breathing the free air. Now he's a corpse rotting in a churchyard.

They'd wasted so much time. When Mary thinks of all the time they'd have had if she hadn't been such a fool… well, it wouldn't have been much more time, given the war and all, but still, so much pain and heartbreak might have been avoided. Now, he's gone for good, and she's left with the ashes of a life.

All that remains of their love is the baby who sleeps so peacefully in the nursery right now.

_It's not fair_, Mary thinks as she continues to cry in her father's arms. Then, unbidden, it's as though she can hear Matthew's voice, clear as day.

_Life is never fair, Mary. If it was, none of us would be who we are now. It's through adversity that we become the people we're meant to be._

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Thanks for reading! Please take a moment to leave a review! It's my first _Downton Abbey_ story!


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